


What Crows Know

by aprilwitching



Category: Original Work
Genre: Ghosts, Multi, Other, life-death-rebirth cycles, magical realism?, midwestern not-gothic, queer coming of age sorta, rituals of sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 17:45:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4445795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aprilwitching/pseuds/aprilwitching
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A nameless small town and the fields and forests that surround it, sometime in the late twentieth or early twenty-first century, somewhere in the United States. Magic is a part of nature here. An omnipresent murder of crows watches generation after generation of local young people conduct their lives (and, in some cases, deaths). The crows see a lot, and once you get them started, they don't like to shut up about it.</p><p>(content warning: violent and disturbing deaths-- not described in graphic detail--, implied rape/sexual assault in one brief scene, generally somewhat macabre subject matter)</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Crows Know

**Author's Note:**

> This story was an attempt to complete a word-association writing exercise posted by the "nosebleedclub" tumblr. It got a little out of hand; I started out intending to write a paragraph-long vignette for each given word/phrase, and I didn't plan for the vignettes to have recurring characters or be connected to one another in any way.  
> Apparently, though, my subconscious had other ideas.
> 
> It's a pretty strange, aimless narrative, but it's the first original fiction I've written and completed in several years, and I'm very proud of that. I hope you enjoy it! I enjoyed writing it.

**_I._ **

  **HIGH SCHOOL FOOTBALL:**   

_We don’t know who’s winning, when they run down the long bright green in their soft armor. We cheer anyway, making a clatter of beak and wing from up on the wires and the high bars of the iron fence around the place where the young men chase and carry the oblong skin balloon from one end of their field to the other. They are shining in their white, their red and gold. They are trying very hard to do whatever it is they are trying to do, clearly. This game, this battle, this practice?_

_(And sometimes the mass of watching humans screams them on, rises from their benches occasionally in great, triumphant waves of pumping limbs, spilled food, painted faces. Joy!)_

 

**HOMECOMING:**

In high school, I always said I’d leave this town someday. It’s all forest and plain, all sterile, manmade lake and bitter winters and summers teeming with mosquitoes, nothing to do but chain-smoke behind the gas station, watch the neon signs sputter in the dark. Watch the stars. We do get good stars, here. But I wanted to see the ocean! I wanted to go to cities, to other towns, to the places I had read and heard about, where things were different. I wanted to rise above the clouds in an airplane, watch our strange, beautiful August storms from the opposite side. Floating.

     I _did_ leave, too, when I was eighteen. I’ve always been one to follow through on a plan.

 It wasn’t quite what I’d expected, but nothing that happens to any of us ever _does_ happen quite like we expect, right? That old cliche. And anyway, a hometown sinks its claws, its tendrils, its roots in you deep. I left, but I come back every year. Can’t help it, really. They put up those gourd lanterns, and they call me down the wet night asphalt like guiding beacons.

     I visit my mother and my little sister, for just this one night every year. We talk. We try to ignore how much time has passed, how much things have changed. Mom makes sticky, sweet foods I loved when I was a kid— all caramel and brown sugar. I never eat them, but I thank her all the same. Sis asks me questions about where I went, what I do during those other 364 days. What it was like to leave, how it felt, was I excited, was I scared. What it was like to—

“No,” I always tell her. “You’re only ten, Sophie.” _You’re only eleven. You’re only twelve, thirteen._ “That’s confidential stuff— you’ll learn in your own time, when you get older. Someday. Don’t rush it.”

And she seems to accept this.

 

Every year, we watch the parade together, and we cheer the floats and the fake-smiling, fake-rhinestone-crowned homecoming queen. I see other faces like mine here and there in the crowd, pale familiar strangers, no longer quite belonging here, but never quite able to sever those old ties either. (Blood, root, whispering leaves. Football team, gas station cigarettes, summer sweat. Ritual. Moist, wormy earth.)

 At some point, they always turn around and find me gone.

Sophie says she goes to the cemetery to leave flowers, after. Every time.

I tell her I appreciate the gesture. 

 But I’m not there, either.

 

  **WITCHCRAFT:**

 Jackie knows the other kids talk about her. She knows what words they whisper. Sometimes, she even thinks they might be true. Those rumor words.

Jackie’s not from this town originally— her family moved, from somewhere very far away, when she was in sixth grade— and even though she’s a junior in high school now, she still sometimes finds the customs here bizarre and cruel, the unspoken rules of conduct hard to fathom. She shudders when she spots ghosts in the crowd at the annual homecoming parade. She puts the wrong hex signs on her family’s apartment door when it’s time to change them. She does not understand the legends and superstitions surrounding the deep lake at the beginning of the forest, behind the perpetual construction site out at the edge of town. Jackie does not really understand how there can be legends and superstitions about a lake that is manmade, lined in concrete, and not even fifty years old. Jackie is uninterested in high school football. Jackie is uninterested in high school boys. Jackie often feels like an outsider, and Jackie is often treated as one by her classmates. They are never exactly mean to her, but they aren’t friendly, either. They whisper behind their hands and hold her a little bit apart.

 Some of them say that Jackie is a witch.

  _She does strange things_ , they observe. _Not strange things like_ our _strange things. She doesn’t participate in our rites and rituals. She doesn’t offer a drop of her blood to the corn before the equinox, doesn’t go to the shrines. She doesn’t wear skirts like the other girls in school but baggy, black boys’ jeans, often covered in colorful smears and stains. Paint and chalk_ , they observe, and what could she possibly be painting or drawing? Jackie doesn’t take the art elective course. Jackie never talks about art. Jackie never talks much in general. What could Jackie be painting? Not gory, surreal cartoon portraits or minutely detailed sketches of local landmarks in miniature, like the real high school art nerds all seem to be into this year. 

      _Maybe it’s spells_ , they whisper. _Maybe she’s painting her own signs in yellow ochre and marine blue and dusty red chalk, brightly layered to curse us or bless us or make us do what she wants. To keep us at arm’s length. To keep us from harming her, or calling her out on her craft, or making her join in our games._

     And alone in her tiny bedroom, adding a new face to the cluttered butcher-paper wall mural of starry skies and family, blood-dripping ears of corn, tall oaks and rambling old brick house of childhood (so far, far away now), Jackie wonders. Jackie hopes. _Let me be a witch_ , Jackie thinks, fiercely. _Let this be a spell._ She carefully etches out the features of the new face in colored pencil. Freckles, snub nose, huge dark eyes. She swirls hair the color of wheat and sunlight around the face in a messy halo, escaped from a high ponytail tied with red chalk ribbon. No mouth yet, because how can Jackie possibly get the smile just right, just the way it looks when she closes her eyes and plays it back to herself across the screen of her brain?

 Jackie touches a paint-grubby index finger to the smooth paper blank where the beautiful girl’s mouth ought to be. “Sarah June,” she says, quietly. _Oh, Sarah June Fisher_. 

 

  **FLORIST:**

 Cerise Fisher runs the flower shop, just like her mother did before she passed, and her mother’s mother before that, and her mother’s mother’s father before that. There has always been a Fisher’s Florist & Natural Remedies at the corner of Lark Street and Main, as far back as anyone can remember. Perhaps even all the way back to the beginning of the town. 

Cerise Fisher lives in the same small, neat, yellow-sided and white-fenced house she was born in thirty-six years ago, and her garden is huge and wondrous. The smell of pollen and sweetness, faint rot and fertilizer hangs around her like a complex perfume. Cerise grows poppies that bloom as wide as children’s heads, little blue roses surrounded by enormous knots of long thorns, aloe that seems to soak up all pain immediately on contact with a burn or wound. She grows things that should never be able to grow so extravagantly in this climate, even taking into account her special pots and potting soils, her sun lamps and protective tarps. She also grows more ordinary plants— tomatoes, daisies, sunflowers, radishes, basil, mint. She keeps a morning glory vine on a trellis by the front door. All of these, too, flourish almost beyond belief. There’s an apple tree in the western corner of her front yard, its branches casting long, fragrant shadows across the sidewalk. 

 _Cerise Fisher has a green thumb_ , people say, _like her mother, and her mother’s mother, and so on and so on_. The land loves Cerise, and she loves it back.

 But Cerise knows that her garden exists, that it blooms and thrives and grows and mutates yearly, as much because of her daughter as because of her. If the land beneath the town’s foundations loves Cerise Fisher, it adores young Sarah June Fisher with an almost fanatical intensity. Sarah June seems able to ripen fruit with a touch of her hand. She generally won’t pick flowers, but huge, gaudy ones often fall from their stems to her feet, apparently of their own accord, and she collects them to arrange in windowsill mason jar bouquets that don’t wilt for weeks. Bees and insects flock to her like she’s a flower herself, in the bright dresses and tie-dyed shirts she favors, with her bright brown-gold hair, but she’s almost never bitten or stung. Sarah June is a happy girl, fascinated by everything in the immediate world around her (town, woods, lake, plains, crows, shadows, cars, storms, other human beings). She’s well-liked at school (although it’s true she has never made any especially close friends), and she earns straight A’s in every subject (although she doesn’t seem to notice or care very much about her academic performance). Cerise is enormously proud of her daughter, although so much seems to come instinctively, easily, automatically to Sarah June that sometimes Cerise worries she hasn’t learned to work hard, to persevere in the face of adversity. 

     Not, Cerise then has to remind herself, a little sadly, that it really matters. People like Sarah June are gifts; there’s a single one every generation or two (or three) in the Fisher family, some moon-touched boy or sun-touched girl, some strange innocent. 

     The town loves them; they love it back. They seem to protect it, hold it together a bit more tightly, somehow, from birth. Maybe it's simply by being deeply, obviously, profoundly _good_ , or at least deeply, obviously, profoundly _of this place_.

One way or another, they never live much past twenty-one. That is simply the way things have to go. Everyone knows it. Cerise knows it. Still, she reflects, it can be hard to accept when it’s someone very dear to you. When it’s, say, a member of your immediate family. When it’s your brother or sister. When it’s your own child. Your _only_ child. Sarah June will never have much besides childhood.

 

“You don’t understand, Mom,” Sarah June says, a week and a half before her seventeenth birthday. “It’s not the same as ordinary dying. It’ll be more like getting married, almost. It _will_ be growing up, just into something else. Something besides a woman who runs a flower shop and lives in a house. I’m going to be fine, really.” She smiles. “I’ll never leave here. I’ll never leave you. I’m only going to be everywhere.”

And Sarah June reaches out and hugs Cerise tightly, then, and sort of laugh-sobs into her mother’s shoulder. “Anyway. Geez, Mom. It’s not like it’s happening _tomorrow_. I have years to go. I have as much time as I need.”

It’s not nearly as comforting as she means it to be.

 

  **TORNADO:**

  _We remember back before Sarah June was ever born, ever even started to squirm inside her mother. Most of us weren’t around then, but our kind tells stories. You can bet we do. We croak them, sing them from telephone wires, whisper them around mouths full of roadkill, share them beak to beak and mother to chick and cousin to cousin. All crows know about the tornado that came through town that summer eighteen years ago. It was a fast, vicious disaster on the heels of a series of slower, more predictable disasters: the drought, the mining companies pressing in, the mass layoffs, the inexorable tug of that foreign war. The tornado did the same work more efficiently, like a factory built to produce rubble and corpses: it smashed houses, stores, barns, and the public library into the dirt-turned-dust, where little recognizable trace of them would remain. It dashed children on the pavement; it broke men’s necks and dogs’ legs. It carried pickup trucks and trees away; it left behind huge rocks and piles of splintered wood._

_In the aftermath, it began to rain for the first time in months: a thin, limp drizzle. The human beings didn’t seem to take much cheer from it, but we were having a fine time, ruffling our feathers in the wet and plucking the eyes from crushed skulls while we could still get them._

_At some point, some of us— or our parents, or our grandparents, or our distant cousins, anyway— looked up to find a young man leaning against what was left of a white picket fence, watching us eat. We recognized him right away, although we hadn’t seen him in that shape for a while, and he was looking much fainter and weaker than usual. We didn’t fly away from him, and he didn’t try to stop us from scavenging meat off the dead._

  _“Well,” he said. “This is a pretty sorry mess.” He sighed a long, mournful sigh that turned into a mournful whistle._

  _When he had been a flesh-and-blood human boy, until he was twenty-one and a day, his name had been Solomon Fisher. He could whistle any song at all, or mimic any bird language, and we liked him especially out of all his family for it. His eyes and hair were as black and shining as our own feathers, then— but now they had dulled, gone smoke-colored and insubstantial. He wasn’t exactly a ghost or a wraith or what-have-you. He wasn’t really dead, even though he wasn’t quite alive, either. He was just forgetting how to have a body. Forgetting who he was as a human being._

 _“I know,” he told us, nodding, as though we had said it out loud. “That’s why I can’t protect the town so well anymore. I forget my purpose. I forget why I love it. I forget what the idea of a town even_ means _, and I spend more and more time losing my name under the dirt, in the roots and the lake depths, and…” he trailed off with a shrug of narrow, uncertain shoulders._

_We rebuked him with hisses and caws— what are explanations to crows? What are apologies? He should have held on harder. There had been so much life, and love, and self in him, once. He had devoted himself to a place, and everything in and around it. He had given himself to that, wholly and willingly. It was what he wanted._

_“I_ know _,” he said, with a faint, lopsided grin. “I really do know. Believe me. But we all fade in time. Twenty-one years of a life here is only so much to sustain you. Maybe this is just the way I go.”_

_He reached out to touch the head of an old female crow, petting her gently with a cold, pale index finger. She let him. He squinted up into the drooling rain. “Still, wish I could do better than this. But you know,” he added, suddenly much more cheerful-sounding, as though the thought had only just that moment occurred to him, “I believe I’m going to have a, a new family member soon. Well. Soon enough. It’s hazy in my mind. But: yes! A baby nephew. Or, no, a niece. Isn’t that wonderful? Perhaps she’ll be another like me. I think she may well be!”_

_The old crow pecked affectionately at his fingertip._

_“Anyway, there will always be someone. There will always be life. And you darn crows, of course,” he promised, before vanishing into the air, the wreckage, and the falling water._

 

 

**_II._ **

  **FAUN:**

 At first, Cam thought there was some runaway kid living in the woods that run up almost right to the back of Cam’s house. Cam would look out the window and catch a flash of shaggy, tightly curled dark hair— almost enough like Cam’s own to be a reflection— shadowing a feral, sharp grin and catlike eyes that most definitely did not belong to Cam at all. Was it the face of an eleven or twelve year old boy with smooth cheeks and long eyelashes? An older teenage girl with no makeup and a strong jaw? Cam’s heart would flutter oddly erratic as Cam leaned towards the windowpane, breath misting it, nose smudging it, to get a better look at the leaf-wreathed face.

 But it would always be gone, then. Nothing there except the woods, and Cam.

 Cam was sure that the face was not imaginary, or an optical illusion. Cam was also sure that the face didn’t belong to anyone Cam knew, anyone Cam had ever seen around town or at school. True, Cam hadn’t met everybody in town, but town wasn’t big at all, and Cam did know most of the kids, at least. And this face, whether boy or girl, younger or older, obviously didn’t belong to a grown-up.

     It was kind of unusual for new people to come to town at all, and Cam had never heard of a new person, a new person who lingered for days and then weeks, being a lone, dirt-streaked kid who just lurked around the edge of the forest all the time and never wandered onto Main Street or up to someone’s front door to reveal herself. Or himself. Or whatever. But that was the conclusion Cam was left to make, and before long the curious fluttering feeling in Cam’s heart had mostly mutated into a keen, solid concern. Was the kid hungry? Too cold at night?

     Cam made extra sandwiches after lunch, when Cam’s parents weren’t paying attention. There probably wasn’t any need to sneak around— Cam’s mother and father were kind, and they had always trusted Cam’s judgment, believed in Cam’s honesty and good intentions— but for some reason, Cam felt the need to keep the kid in the woods a secret for now. 

      _Maybe it’s because I’m thirteen_ , thought Cam, putting two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and two egg salad sandwiches in a tupperware container. _Teenagers are supposed to be secretive, right? Teenagers aren’t supposed to want to tell their parents anything._

     Cam wrapped the tupperware container in a slightly scratchy, but warm, old blanket the color of dog poop, which neither Cam nor Cam’s parents would miss. Cam left the whole bundle under the big oak directly across from Cam’s window, then turned and went back inside, running bitten fingernails through tangled curls starting to grow uncomfortably long. Cam did not feel very much like a teenager. _But I don’t feel like a little kid, either_ , thought Cam, flopping stomach-down on the living room couch with a comic book. _I don’t feel like much of anything._

 

     When the comic book was over, Cam wandered out into the tiny strip of backyard facing the edge of the woods, not really expecting anything in particular, but wanting to stretch and feel the afternoon sunshine. 

     Someone was taking the blanket bundle, lifting it right out of its cradle of oak roots.

     Cam froze. Before that moment, Cam had encountered the expression over and over in books. “So-and-so froze.” Cam had always assumed it just meant going really still and quiet because you were scared, or shocked by something. Now, Cam felt chilled, like feathers of ice were creeping along Cam’s skin, making it impossible to move, effortless to stay fixed in position. Cam felt over-filled, vein-gorged, by a gigantic emotion, but could never have named it. _Surprise? Wonder?_

 It wasn’t a runaway kid, after all.

 The person, or being, with the bundle in its arms had the strong-boned yet delicate face that Cam had seen in the window. It had the same curly hair, the same golden eyes, the same flared nostrils. Its torso was lean, wiry, and as ambiguous in sex or age as its facial features, but still human: tan-skinned, spotted with moles and freckles. But its lower back and butt were covered in thick, shaggy fur— _or, no_ , Cam thought, _wool_ — like a goat’s or a sheep’s. It even seemed to have a little tail, twitching slightly against the backs of its legs. Its legs, which were absolutely not human in any respect. They crooked impossibly backwards where they should have had knees. They tapered down to thin, bony goat-ankles ending in slim, black, cloven goat-hooves. 

    _It’s Pan_ , thought Cam. _It’s a satyr. No, a_ **faun**. Cam felt less surprised than the revelation might have warranted— there wasn’t one instant of doubt or disbelief. Cam felt _more_ surprised than the revelation might have warranted— after all, Cam had grown up thirteen years in a town where ghosts openly roamed the streets every year at the homecoming celebration, and every good citizen past the age of seven shed a few ritual drops of his or her blood in the cornfields each harvest season, the corn singing almost understandable hymns in response. Cam knew vaguely that many ordinary markers of Cam’s life might seem fantastic or impossible to people in other places, where things worked differently. And Cam’s father had always spoken reverently of the spirits in the woods. Cam had never disbelieved Dad, exactly. It’s just that Cam had never expected to actually _see_ such a spirit, _here_ , taking a crummy old blanket and egg salad sandwiches from beneath an oak tree in Cam’s own backyard.

      The faun was nothing like a homecoming ghost, either. When Cam thought of “spirits”, Cam thought of see-through, washed-out, ethereal things. The faun was solid, animal. Almost painfully alive. Almost threateningly real. It breathed through its full-lipped human mouth. Its goat haunches twitched, as if to bolt. It smelled of clean sweat and polleny musk. Cam’s heart ached and throbbed. 

     “Hey—,” Cam whispered, through dry, trembling lips. The faun immediately fled, vanishing into the trees like a fish into water, not a ripple of leaf or branch left behind to show where it had been. 

     But the tupperware of sandwiches and the blanket were gone, and there was a clear, lone, cloven hoofprint nestled between two fat, exposed oak roots.

 

That was last Wednesday.

Today is Tuesday.

 

Cam is sitting like a living statue in the backyard, waiting. Cam is not frozen, but only trying to stay very quiet and still, like a wild animal. Cam has brought another sandwich as an offering, and a bright green apple. They sit a few feet away from Cam on the grass, towards the tree line.

     All this week, Cam has been thinking about the faun. How it isn’t quite one thing or another— not a spirit, but still magical, or supernatural. Not a human, and not a goat or a deer or a sheep. Not male and not female.

     Cam has never felt like a beast or a magical creature, only like a person, a regular kid. Well, sort of: It’s true that Cam doesn’t feel quite like a boy or like a girl. Cam doesn’t fit into one gender or the other, and Cam never has. Cam wants to be both, or neither one— Cam isn’t totally sure. Cam doesn’t want to “go through puberty” like they keep talking about in health class, like many of Cam’s classmates already have. Then everyone will assume they _know_ what Cam is, even more than they do already— a Camilla, with sparkly, chipped toenail polish, breasts, and small hands? A Cameron, with grubby cargo shorts, a low rough voice, patchy sideburns, and short short hair? _No thanks!_ Cam likes being a late bloomer. But Cam also doesn’t want to stay a kid forever, doesn’t want to remain a child. That’s another kind of in-between.

     Cam doesn’t have warm, deep brown skin like Cam’s mother, or freckly, pale pink skin like Cam’s dad. Cam’s skin is sort of in the middle, not really close to either, and sometimes people assume Cam isn’t really related to one or both of Cam’s parents, which hurts a little. That’s an in-between, too.

Cam isn’t tall or short, skinny or fat, ugly or particularly good-looking. Cam isn’t popular or a social outcast. Cam’s family isn’t rich, isn’t poor. Cam isn’t one of the smart kids in school, but Cam’s not one of the slow kids, or the slackers. Those are in-betweens that should probably make Cam feel more normal, but sometimes they make Cam feel awkward, disguised, invisible. It’s like Cam is hiding behind a tree without even meaning to.

     Cam thinks that maybe, just maybe, Cam and the faun have a lot in common. But even though the faun is an in-between creature, in-between so many different things, there’s no questioning what it is, or where it belongs. It looks completely at home, darting in and out of the woods. It looks completely itself. It’s a _faun_ — not a human with goat legs, or a goat with a human face.

     That makes Cam hope that Cam can also feel completely at home one day, someday. That Cam can grow up and just be Cam. That maybe this town, surrounded by these woods, is a good place for in-betweens. After all, it _is_ a place where ghosts come back. And look at those Fisher people! Those kids who don’t really die, but don’t stay alive either. Nobody discusses either phenomenon a whole lot, but everybody knows. It’s ordinary. It’s normal here.

 _Maybe_ , Cam thinks, _maybe the faun will get to be a normal part of my life, too. Maybe we’ll be friends. I wonder if it can talk? Does it have a name?_

 

There’s a rustling from the edge of the woods. Cam sits up a little straighter. Breathes a little more shallowly. Tries to pay close attention to the sounds, smells, movements behind that curtain of foliage. Waits. Waits.

 

  **VARSITY:**

 There’s football, of course.

There’s basketball, too. There’s cheerleading— Sarah June Fisher leaps and yells with such sincerity and enthusiasm that everyone on either team, and even everyone watching the game, starts to get the sense that they, personally, are about to win something. They stand a little taller, grab each other’s hands, make spontaneous, silent resolutions to turn their lives around, starting tomorrow. They play with renewed energy. Joy is contagious. No one cares that Sarah June’s voice is perhaps the only unlovely thing about her— it’s a little hoarse and discordant, a little like she’s constantly about to laugh or cry or lose control of it in some way. A little like the voice of a crow. She’s loud, and she means every word she says, down there on the long green field.

There’s the recently formed dance squad— its only consistent members, year to year, have been Zane andZelda Palermo, the twins. They move like one mind in two bodies, and they give each other new stick-and-poke tattooed sigils on the tops of their feet a few days before each competition, bending across each other in tandem with threaded, inked-up needles and ice.

     There’s not a swim team— no pool, and who would go swimming in the lake? (Jackie did, once. Nothing bad happened, but she felt watched the entire time, and the water at night had a strange luminescence, a strange electric tingle when she slipped in. She hasn’t yet gotten up the nerve to try again.)

 

There’s adolescent camaraderie and competition. There are these meaningless, all-important rites of passage. There are those teenagers whose rite of passage is in shunning them, too. In finding other ways to prove themselves, and to belong. 

 There’s Emmeline Hawthorne, the town’s only sixteen-year-old aspiring slam poet and performance artist, painting her face like Ziggy Stardust and attracting small crowds of gawkers with loud bursts of rhyming vitriol in the middle of the town square, by the dragon-shaped fountain that sometimes spurts milk, or saltwater.

There’s Cam Kaplansky-Ortiz, trying to skateboard in the grocery store parking lot, skinning both knees until they look like ground beef, walking home proud and sweaty to draw plotless, messy notebook comic strips about a group of feral animal-people living in the woods, scavenging supplies from the houses at the edge of town, making their own crude weapons and tools and skateboards out of what they can find at the dump.

There’s Sophie Hart, in her dead brother’s old jacket with the big letters on the back, slouched against a wall, watching Cam stride past as the daylight thickens into dark. Something about Cam makes her want to try playing the piano again, even after begging her mom to let her quit lessons last year; makes her want to write songs. She twists a cracked, cheap mood ring around on her pinky finger. It’s been traffic-light yellow for days now, but she forgets what that means.  

There’sDave O'Connell, who builds scrap-part robots that sometimes explode by accident and bleaches his hair to a weird shade of rusty, fungal-looking blonde.

There’s Blake Lee, who knows how to get high on stuff you can make in your kitchen or find at the drugstore, stuff that isn’t even illegal. Who’s repeating the twelfth grade but reads books by dead European philosophers with hard-to-pronounce names and asks questions that make the teachers nervous.

 

There’s Jackie, again, Jackie Vespers, painting spells or wishes in her stuffy apartment room, dressed all in black with black, spiky hair, almost resembling one of the omnipresent town crows. Jackie, who’s taken to lurking like a crow at the top of the bleachers during every cheerleading practice, eyes glittering, face beginning to flush. She sighs into her cupped hands, and dares herself not to duck or glance away this time, if, on the field, Sarah June looks up at her.

 

  **BUBBLEGUM:**

  _Of course, we see everything that goes on around here. We see more than even the ghosts do, because we are alive. We see more than Solomon Fisher-that-was, for whom looking at the town and the land is too much like trying to look at his own body, his own brain, his own heart. We see much more than Sarah June, still anchored to an ordinary flesh, an ordinary existence, the innocence of an unscathed child. We see more than Jackie, or Cam, or Cerise._

  _We are alive, and we are not human, and we can go anywhere with our fine, strong wings._

  _We see the creeping things that part the wheat and the corn with their long, long bony fingers at night. We see what slumbers all day at the bottom of the lake, glance at it from a birds-eye-view as we cackle over and past. We see the long coiled worms in the ripening fruit and the bright jewel-flecks in the gray pavement. We see the colorful wads of chewed-up sugar and starch the human youth spit there: pink or blue or lavender and marred by various shoe-bottoms. The shifting mosaic patterns they make, day by day, year by year._

_We are most interested in watching human people, and the human youth in particular. They are so volatile and raucous, bitter and sweet. They are and are not their parents repeated; they insist they are not, always, decade after decade and season after season. Still, they grow up in this town, they live and die in this town, they bleed onto the fields as their parents and their grandparents did, and most of them never really leave. They come back annually even after storms rip them open, or car collisions, or men with knives, or diseases festering under their featherless skins. After they are swallowed whole by all the world._

_And yet, and still, each one is different. And their world does change, somewhat. Hour by hour. Century by century. Time by time._

 

  ** _III._**

  **PASTELS:**

 For some, there’s a necessary balance to be struck between holding life loosely, lightly, knowing it cannot be yours for long, and embracing all the world around you, clinging tightly because it’s been given to you for such a little time and you must absorb all you possibly can, carry it into the ether when you’re done, use it as fuel against destruction and decay. Sarah June knows that. Sarah June has known it all her conscious life. She tries so hard to keep that balance, but sometimes she gets a twinge of worry that she’s failing. That, seeing her future always ahead of her, feeling it tug at her gut— a hanging sword above, a comet falling from the sky, a doom, a fate she can’t refuse— she keeps her life at arm’s length only, refusing to fully inhabit it.

     Sarah June has no ambitions, no dreams, no goals. (Why should she? Why bother?) Her joy in the town and the life of the town, and the life of the woods and fields and lake and sky, _is_ sincere, don’t misunderstand. It’s the joy of someone with no real stake in any of it, though. Spectator’s joy. It is as though she isn’t quite real. Or as though the _town_ isn’t real, but some long, captivating novel she’s reading to herself. _That can’t be right, can it?_ Sarah June wonders.

     The worry and the doubt bubble up in her at strange moments, more and more often now that she’s seventeen, no longer a little girl and closer to the end of her time here than to its beginning. She feels them stir when she’s alone after cheerleading practice, listening to the ghosts and crows gossip, knowing that she’s the only living human being who can understand their chatter, trying to half-forget and half-remember all the secrets she learns. They rise again when she’s barefoot in the garden at twilight, watching the blinking red light of a faraway radio tower and the glowing eyes of scavenging animals by the dumpsters across the street. She smells the promise of rain in the thick lavender air and she sighs. It is a more mournful sound than she ever knew she could make before, and, though she doesn’t know it, it is an exact echo of her uncle Solomon’s sighing, long years back.

     And lately, nameless anxieties snake through Sarah June's intestines whenever she thinks about Jackie Vespers. Sullen, handsome Jackie staring at her from the top of the bleachers or sneaking sharp, furtive glances in her direction from beneath the hood of her sweatshirt during their advanced biology class. There’s something about Jackie that dissolves her general sense of unreality a little, but she’s not sure what it is, or whether she likes it. Jackie doesn’t look at her like she’s some kind of saint, the way some people in town do, or like she’s a sun, beautiful but painful, dangerous to do more than briefly glance it. Jackie doesn’t look at her like she’s an idea wearing bones and blood and skin. Jackie doesn’t look at her with soft, awed devotion. Jackie doesn’t look at her like she’s dead.

     Sarah June isn’t sure how Jackie _does_ look at her. She only knows it is _different_ , the way most things about Jackie are different— her color-smeared black clothes, her unsmiling directness, her skepticism, her solitary braveries or foolishnesses. (The crows shouted about her lake-swimming venture for upwards of a week.) 

     Sarah June knows better than to believe the rumors that Jackie practices witchcraft. Jackie hasn’t a whiff of magic on her. Sarah June suspects that Jackie is an artist, which is a much more wonderful secret occupation anyway, in Sarah June’s opinion.

     Some of the crows tell Sarah June that Jackie loves her. Is _in love_ with her.

     Sarah June considers this idea rather farfetched and unlikely.

     Sarah June is pretty sure she knows what a teenager with a crush looks like. Every year from fifth or sixth grade onward, a boy— or two, or three— has tried to ask her out, or made some kind of fumbling, beet-faced love confession in the halls, behind the bleachers, after class or before an assembly. These boys, most of all, barely seem able to look at her, at least while they’re speaking to her— when they don’t think she’s paying attention, they stare at her body in a glazed, enraptured way, taking in every surface detail but not truly observing anything about Sarah June, the person, at all. 

Sarah June thinks she’d like to be in love, to have a crush, to date like other teenagers— after all, there’s no rule, stated or implied, that says a person like her can’t. It is part of being alive, for however brief a time. But Sarah June doesn’t want to fall in love like _that_ — with a fantasy about sex or dramatic, poetical Romance, projected like a flickering mask onto some oblivious near-stranger. She wants to see, and be seen. And Sarah June suspects that no one who saw _her_ , Sarah-June-the-person, truly and directly and not as a symbol or synecdoche for something else, who stared at her as Jackie stares at her, could ever feel more than pity for her, or contempt, or the kind of fascination they might have for a weird insect.

 

Still, Sarah June has decided: today is the day she’s going to talk to Jackie. Jackie, who has never spoken to her before but twice, both times perfunctory, blunt, and only about school assignments. It’s silly, thinks Sarah June, that she hadn’t thought to do this much sooner. A conversation will untangle her anxiety, give it a name and a reason at last, and she will understand Jackie in ways she doesn’t understand Jackie now. Jackie will feel, finally, like an ordinary part of everything else in the forest and lake and town.

     Sarah June’s palms are sweating. She wipes them absentmindedly on her skirt, leaving damp streaks down the fabric. All her senses feel amplified. The crows laugh at her from their various perches. _Today I am going to talk to Jackie Vespers_ , Sarah June reminds herself. Jackie Vespers, who is sitting right there, across the town square, under the wishing tree. 

     It occurs to Sarah June that she has never before in her life felt so reluctant— _frightened_ , even— to do something she wants to do this badly. Wants to do so much it’s a palpable, half-pleasant ache in her chest. 

     This is _very_ strange.

     Sarah June gathers her courage in loosely held fists, and walks towards the wishing tree, where Jackie, cradled between two enormous exposed roots carved with wishes and tied with ribbons, sits hunched over a book, scribbling in its pages with what looks like a piece of pale blue chalk. She doesn’t look up from her work, but Sarah June’s heart beats a little faster to see it. Jackie doesn’t do artwork at school, Sarah June knows that, and this is the first time Sarah June has seen her doing it in any public place at all.

      “You, um, you’re--” says Sarah June in a tiny, cracked voice that surprises her, as she reaches the shade of the wishing tree’s outspread branches. She still can’t see what Jackie’s drawing; the book’s front covers and Jackie’s shoulders, Jackie’s messy hair, are hiding the pages from her. She takes another step closer. She tries again, since there’s no way Jackie heard her the first time. “Hi. Hi! _Jackie_! Hey, I didn’t know you were an artist!” _Yes, I did. Why did I say that?_

     Jackie shudders into a rigidly upright position suddenly, almost violently. She whips her face around to make eye contact with Sarah June. Sarah June can see the clear, glossy whites of Jackie’s eyes, and she realizes— this close— that the other girl is as nervous as she is, that at least some of her habitual direct gaze stems from startled-deer wariness, and not cool, reserved judgment or aloof, confident daring. Sarah June stops where she is and bends down a little, so she won’t loom over Jackie. She knows how to deal with shy wild creatures. “I’m sorry if I surprised you,” says Sarah June, gently. “Or if I’m bothering you. I can leave, if you want?”

     Jackie shakes her head. “ ’S okay,” she says, her voice soft but not small, not a whisper, deeper and more musical-sounding than Sarah June remembers it being. “Don’t leave. You can, uh, sit down even. I guess. I’m not real great at talking to people, but,” she swallows visibly, “I _guess_ , if you. If you _want_ to…” 

     Sarah June moves just slightly closer to Jackie, and eases herself to the ground in a cross-legged position, all as slowly and deliberately as possible. Jackie, watching, seems to loosen and settle her own body a little.

     “So,” says Sarah June, gesturing towards a small mason jar next to Jackie’s high-top encased left foot, “your medium is chalk? That’s pretty neat. If I drew things, I’d probably just use pencils. I’m afraid I’m not all that creative.” The mason jar is filled with thick, colorful sticks that leave faint smears of pigment against the glass. “It looks like a bouquet,” says Sarah June. She knows she tends to speak aloud every inane thought that drifts through her mind when she’s at a loss for conversation. She knows how it can make her seem: vapid, childish, sometimes insensitive. She doesn’t, however, know how _not_ to do it. “ _I’d_ sure like a chalk bouquet one of these days. Wouldn’t it be something else if chalk grew up from the ground, like fruit and flowers? Well. In a _way_ it does, because it’s made of—“

     “Oh, it’s not!” Jackie interrupts. “Sorry! I mean, that’s not chalk. Uh, those are pastels, actually.”

      “Pastels?” asks Sarah June. “I thought…that only meant certain colors? You know, sky blue, pink, light yellow, green like the foam that’s on the lake sometimes…lavender…” she flutters her hand through the air. Her palms, thankfully, have stopped sweating, though she still feels very, _very_ strange.  “But I don’t know anything about art. Is that wrong?"

     “No,” says Jackie. She explains what pastels are, colors and tools for drawing alike. She rambles on a little, then, but Sarah June doesn’t mind. Jackie has the air of someone who likes to talk about her art, even its most trivial, mundane aspects. _She probably doesn’t get to do this very often_ , thinks Sarah June. It’s a sad thought. Jackie is good at it. She stops stammering and “uh-“ ing and cutting herself off.

     “Can I see?” asks Sarah June, eventually. “What you’re drawing, that is. If you don’t mind. I really _would_ like to see it.” She smiles, and she doesn’t know it, but the effect is dazzling. Jackie’s eyes widen again, in that spooked-deer way. She is quiet for a long, held breath of a moment. Then she nods, sharply and quickly, and shoves her held-open sketchbook into Sarah June’s hands. Sarah June blinks at the half-colored image there. 

      “Jackie,” she says, giving it the lilt of a question although the answer would be obvious to anyone with eyes, “it’s _me_?”

 

   **SERIAL KILLER:**

  _Make no mistake: our lives are cut down like corn and wheat. Human lives, too. There are the storms, of course: tornados sometimes, and the bright, multi-colored lightning that can cook a pedestrian in her boots, that sometimes seems to seek a pulsing heart to pass through, like a guided weapon. The lightning here isn’t like lightning anywhere else._

_One year the town flooded. There have been terrible droughts._

_Some of the creatures in the woods abscond with citizens’  children, with aimless young adults, occasionally even with middle-aged or elderly people, with husbands and wives and parents and friends and the odd lonely, friendless recluse. It’s never clear if these people have actually died, if they were eaten, if they were taken to some other purpose, if they even went willingly. But their lives, their lives in the town, have certainly ended in some sense: they are never seen here again. Their ghosts do not show up for the homecoming festival, and there is quiet debate as to the significance of this fact. No one ever looks for these people. They are rarely mourned or mentioned after their disappearances, at least in public. The human-sized dolls made of mud and sticks, trash and feathers and twine, that are left to replace the vanished ones are quietly burned in fireplaces and backyard pits._

_There are sometimes accidents. We are hit by cars from time to time, like the rabbits and foxes and deer that we eat, and we eat our own dead, too. Humans don’t die this way very often, but it does happen. Human beings fall from high places, or succumb to allergic reactions: bee sting, peanut butter. People freeze to death, lost in a December blizzard. People shoot themselves while cleaning their guns. People die of diseases, of age. People die for no apparent reason at all, their hearts simply stopping in their kitchens, at a bus stop, while raking leaves from a lawn. Something bursts in their brains, suddenly, and they fall to their knees, their eyes glassy and rolled heavenwards._

 

_Outright suicide and murder are rare. Yes, a drifter came through the area some years back, a handsome man in a shabby car, and ended up strangling a teenage boy who was trying to hitchhike out and away. He didn’t have time to bury the corpse before something large and dark heaved itself up from a ditch filled with ferns and pulled him into its seething body with a sound like bones being crushed. We descended on his unfinished business just after, left open to the sky and our tearing mouths. A murder to a murder! Soon, nothing much remained of either one. The shabby car is still parked off a back road, hidden by a thicket of prickly evergreen bushes, rusting a little more every season._

_But the people who_ live _here—_ they _don’t really murder each other. Not_ that _way, not for rage or jealousy or fear or possessiveness or a sick, petty thrill. Who knows why? Not us!_

 _It’s surely not that each and every one of them is gentle, or kind, or content, or what they call_ good _. Don’t make us laugh!_

_Maybe it’s because it would be too difficult to get away with, in a town this size. Maybe it’s loyalty. Maybe it’s because, on some level, they all understand themselves as connected, as parts of a single whole— it would be like cutting off their own fingers in a fit of pique. Maybe it’s a waste of useful blood. Maybe it’s because this place is strong. Holy. It hums with its own purpose and continuity; every living thing can feel that hum in its bones or cartilage or carapace or skin. Once, we believe, all the world was filled with this humming. Now, it is present only in cut-off islands here and there— a town. A few blocks in a city. A forest. A circle of ocean that ships avoid, and birds do not._

_What they do to the Fisher youth is something else. It’s never quite the same: for instance, Salma Fisher simply wasted away, becoming thinner and more translucent and more serene over the course of a year, until finally one day all the townspeople realized that no one could see her, or touch her, or find her in any way, anywhere. It was like she’d dissolved in the wind; none of them could pinpoint the exact moment she had crossed from being one thing to being the other. (_ We _know, of course. But we’re not going to tell you.)_

 _But with Solomon, it did_ resemble _a murder, in its general shape._

_A group of young people his own age, his former classmates, came for him one late summer night wearing various Halloween masks and their best dresses or suits. They were entirely sober, but they walked in a kind of collective trance, their breathing in sync. They did not carry flashlights, but that didn’t appear to hinder them in any way. Their hands were empty, waiting._

_Solomon seemed to be expecting them; when they approached the Fisher house, he calmly stepped outside. He walked down the driveway as though nothing particularly special was happening, his hands in his pockets. He wore his ordinary clothes, and his hair was tangled as it often was, and his eyes were very bright. He didn’t speak, and neither did the gathered, costumed crowd. A young man wearing a grayish-blue suit and a mask like an abstracted bird’s face offered his arm to Solomon, who took it. A young woman wearing a long, off-white gown and a mask with the features of an unpopular U.S. president reached out to take Solomon’s other arm, and he let her. They didn’t march him down the road like a prisoner; they_ escorted _him, as though they were all going to a dance. They took him past houses and gardens and quiet intersections and closed-up shops. They took him out past the edge of town and into a thin part of the woods, or a tree-studded field. An in-between place._

_There was a rough circle of stones and bricks laid out in a clear space. The rocks and rubble were piled high, into a miniature, jagged wall. Edges speared up fierce and splintered, dark against the paler dark of the grass, under a weak moon._

_Solomon removed his escorts’ hands from his arms, nodded to them, and then, as an afterthought, polite and grave, kissed each on the forehead. Or, rather, on the latex rubber of their masks. He stepped into the circle, lifting his knees high to clear the pile. He walked until he stood in the center. He looked up. Looked down. Looked from side to side. The others were spreading out around the circle. Solomon closed his eyes. He began to whistle, slow and soft._

_In unison, each person surrounding him lifted a stone, or brick, or heavy piece of detritus. Each person took aim, and let their projectile fly towards the middle of the circle. Each person bent to repeat these actions, not stopping even to note whether their first weapon had hit its target or not._

_The whistling continued for a little while longer, though it had become very faint and watery-sounding. Then it stopped, and there was only the sound of heavy things falling through the dark, heavy things landing in the dark, the ragged breathing of the stone-throwers._

 

_If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else. He went willingly._

 

_The following morning, all the twenty and twenty-one and twenty-two year-old townspeople woke disoriented in their childhood bedrooms, or in their cheap apartments-- alone or beside their equally young husbands or wives, boyfriends or girlfriends-- or on their friends’ couches. They woke with dirt and grit under their nails, sore muscles, and wet, red eyes. They were in subdued, melancholy moods for the rest of the week. Several complained of headaches. A few spoke of unusually vivid, haunting dreams. If they remembered, or knew, or suspected what they had done, none ever mentioned it. If they did not know, or if they wondered what had happened to them that night, none ever mentioned that, either._

 

  **THUNDER:**

 I think it was a few weeks, maybe a month or two, before I knew what had happened to me.

 I remembered hiking out to the main road, hoping to hitch to the nearest actual city, or at least somewhere with a Greyhound bus depot. I remembered the guy in the black station wagon, a real sketchy-looking rustbucket with no plates, but _he_ was normal-seeming and friendly. Not creepy-excessive friendly, just friendly. He was really attractive, for an old guy. Well. Maybe early forties, so not _old_ , but much older than _I_ am. Than I _was_. He had pale skin. Really white, square teeth. Wavy hair in a style that should have looked stupid on someone his age, but didn’t. Jeans, t-shirt. Big hands on the steering wheel. I remembered smiling at him as I got in the passenger side seat. I remembered giving him a fake name, but telling the truth about my age, and where I was going, and what I wanted to do when I got there. I remembered that even after he went off on this narrow, bumpy side road, totally going in the wrong direction, I wasn’t suspicious. I figured he was just lost, or maybe even that it was the woods trying to keep me from leaving, trying to herd me back inside everything I hoped I could, at least for a while, put behind me.

 I remembered his big hands around my neck, and I remembered gagging for air I couldn’t find, and I remembered _pain_ , and seeing black spots start to swarm in my vision like gnats. I remembered the unfairness of it, the angry, frantic monologue racing through my mind: _You said if I did exactly what you wanted and promised not to tell anyone, you’d let me go. You said you wouldn’t_ hurt _me._

 

I didn’t remember fighting back, if I fought back. I didn’t remember thinking I might die, would probably die. I didn’t remember dying.

 

I remembered opening my eyes and seeing leaves above me, and drops of water shivering at the tips of those leaves with this hyper-clarity, hyper-reality, and feeling no more pain. A wind rushed and snarled around and above me, and the sky was dark. The man was gone. 

     And then the sky was bright again, cloud-free, and I could hear cicadas buzzing like the sound of the heat itself. My skin felt cold, though I knew it wasn’t. I should’ve been sweating. It was a sweltering summer day. And I looked down, but I wasn’t able to see my body, somehow. I could _feel_ it, I thought, and I could still see and hear, so I figured I must have eyes and ears. But my arms were invisible, or nowhere. My legs, my feet, my shoes. The longer I looked for them, the harder it was to sense them, or anything at all, to remember what and where I was supposed to be. So I stopped.

    And then the sky was bleeding psychedelic with a sunrise or a sunset, I had no idea which, and I was standing in the road again, somehow. There was a boy beside me, standing a few feet away, just _looking_ at me-- calmly, with his hands loose and casual in his pants pockets. Something about him made _me_ feel calm, too. At first I thought he was a young teenage kid, because he was kinda on the shrimpy side, but then his face sort of settled in my vision and I realized he had to be at least a couple years older than I was. Hair like a bird’s nest. _Beautiful_ , actually, rather than handsome. The kind of beauty where it takes a few minutes for it to sneak up on you. 

He nodded at me. There wasn’t anything ghostly or corpselike about him, but somehow, in that moment, I understood that he was a dead person. Or maybe not dead, but, at least, not alive.

     He nodded again. “Close enough,” he said in a low, scratchy voice.

     “Am _I_ …” I asked out loud. It seemed reasonable enough to assume. “Shit. I’m dead, too. Or just _dead_. Oh, fuck. I’m _murdered_. That _pervert_ \--”

     “Afraid so.” He did sound truly sorry, but in a distant way. The way you might feel bad for a minor character’s tragic death in a movie.

     “Then I’m trapped here forever.” I felt dread crawling over me. That, and anger at my own dumbass decisions. Get into a seedy car with some random older dude. Sure.

     “This place takes care of its creatures.”

I might have sighed, or rolled my (invisible?) eyes at that, because he continued, “Nothing’s _forever_. You’ll come back annually, for a while, like everyone else in your...ah, situation... does. Until no one remembers you anymore. Until no one has need.”

     “And what? I just haunt the fucking woods for the rest of the year? I just rot in the ground?”

     “Oh, not unless you _want_ to.” He smiled lopsidedly. His teeth were gapped in front and a little crooked. Somehow, that was a relief. They weren’t at all supernatural-looking. They were nothing like the teeth of the man in the black station wagon. 

The boy took one of his hands out of his pockets and extended it to me. I only stared at it like he was holding out a fish. “You can go anywhere you want to, nearly,” he explained. “All it takes is a thought. You won’t be seen or heard or felt, of course. You won’t live again. Still.”

     I thought about that. I thought about the airplanes I would never get to be carried inside. I thought about seeing a storm from above, the way I’d always imagined it. I thought about my little sister. My mom. I thought about the lights of every city I’d failed to reach. I thought about the stars.

     “Who _are_ you, anyway?” I asked the boy. Something in my brain itched. _Did I already know this? Was I_ supposed _to know?_ “What are you doing here, talking to me? You some kind of ghost welcoming committee?” 

     “I’m a psychopomp, sort of,” he said, his hand still in the air between us. I wasn’t sure what the word meant, but it sounded like he was actually agreeing with me. “I’m the way this part of the world talks to people,” he said. “Or, I’m the way this part of the world understands what it’s _like_ to be people. Or, I…” he paused, suddenly sounding younger, and more ordinary. More _human_. Like anybody my age, anybody I might once have smoked behind the convenience store beside. “I’m, uh, the way a town... preserves itself?”

     “Amazing,” I said. It didn’t come out with as much sarcasm as I wanted. “Do you have, like, a _name_?”

    “No. But neither do you, anymore.”

     “ _I_ have a name,” I said, annoyed. And I told him what it was. I said it, and I grabbed hold of his hand, squeezing hard. There was a sensation like carbonation fizzing between us, like the whole world was dissolving. And then we were in the air. In the _sky_. Above the clouds, which were dark, suddenly. They covered the view below. The air felt charged. It rumbled, then screamed, and a bolt of branching many-colored light scissored through the cloudblack like a fire turned into a tree.

     I couldn’t see the boy anymore, but I still felt his hand, his bony fingers scrunched in mine. I could still hear his voice, close, even though the storm was so loud, and he was so quiet.

     “Don’t cling to it too tightly,” he sighed. “but once, my name was Solomon Fisher. That was a long time ago.”

    “Hell,” I laughed, almost sobbed. “ _Fisher_. Should’ve guessed.” 

     The lightning arced and twisted through the storm, and there was rain falling below us, I knew, and thunder making its merciless noise all around. Some emotion was filling me, crowding the whole shape of what I remembered as my body and myself, overflowing at last to spill out into the weather. I could feel the sound and the light now, the clouds and the water, as though they were my own arms. And I could not tell, I didn’t know, I _still_ don’t know, if that emotion was fierce, wild sorrow, or anger, or joy. 

And I knew that it wouldn’t matter if I did or not, but I kept right on holding Solomon Fisher’s hand.

     

  **BRIGHT COLORS:**

  _Who can know what the future holds? Not us! Perhaps the long-fingered ones in the corn, or Solomon Fisher, or Sarah June can predict a little._ We _are creatures of the present moment. What we assume: The world turns itself around. The spring and the summer and the fall and the winter follow each other in their long circle dance._

_This place, like most places, has no single story that begins at one point in time and clearly ends, all neatly wrapped and tied, at another. It exists and it changes. It grows and it shrinks. It continues to be itself. We fly among the plant limbs and humming wires that invade the lower sky. We eat the dead. We spy on the living. We speak their many, fractured, endless stories._

 

_It’s summer now, and everything is blooming, or rotting, and garish. The streaks and smears of art on Jackie Vespers' seasonally impractical jeans seem to throb and pulse. When Sarah June Fisher puts her hand on Jackie’s knee, and sees that this is good, a good thing to do, and lets it stay there, sensing a spiral galaxy of accidental bruise below the fabric, they both think, looking down, that something has changed in that hand, in her skin, that it has become brighter, warmer, like Sarah June herself is bursting into bloom._

_Cerise Fisher’s garden grows explosively, and she wears loud print dresses and wide straw hats to tend it. From a distance, she looks very like her daughter. When she whistles as she pulls the weeds, it’s an echo of the much older brother she barely got to know, the older brother she still sees sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, looking decades younger than she is now, skulking below the apple tree. Or maybe only_ watching _, wistful or proud; who can say? Whenever Cerise tries to look at him directly, or for more than a moment, he vanishes._ Wait _, she thinks at him, each time._ I know you’re coming for Sarah June. I know where she’s going. But she’s mine, now, and she still belongs here, in the summer and the heat and the light and the flowers. 

_Sophie Hart sits on the edge of her bed, practicing the only three guitar chords she knows. G, C, A minor.  They make a colorful jangle in the muggy air. Birds and insects outside her wide open windows, plus the distant hum of a lawnmower and the lazy drone of cars on the main road, provide a tangled almost-harmony. The guitar is old, stolen from the room that used to belong to her older brother, and it’s obviously out of tune, but she doesn’t know how to fix that yet. She’s enjoying the noise anyway. The hard, thin steel of the strings feels better under her fingers than piano keys ever did; it’s a pleasant kind of hurt. Her brother liked this stupid folk punk and heavy metal stuff when he was alive; dead, he apparently leans more to Tom Waits and Johnny Cash. Sophie prefers chirpy top 40 pop songs that unfurl glittering, neon shapes in her mind, or their mom’s Nanci Griffith tapes. She wonders what kind of music Cam likes._

_A faun runs through the trees right near the edge of town, making a sound like laughter. Several ghosts watch it pass, blinking the memory of eyes. The faun is gold and olive; the trees are wet, varied green._

_Emmeline Hawthorne paints daisies on her face and sneaks out at night to take hallucinogens with Blake Lee under the high school playing field bleachers. They dream without sleeping and make out frenetically in the dark, cool dirt, somehow avoiding cuts from the shiny shards of broken bottles and torn metal cans that decorate that ground._

_The lake has an eerie bioluminescence. It moves when the wind isn’t on it, in the early hours of the morning. At night, it looks like a second, wet moon, fallen and flattened on the earth._

_Roadkill bursts in loud colors and scents on the asphalt. We pull it apart. The crops in the fields grow high. There is no game in this, and so no one is winning, or losing, either._

_The crickets make their whirring music. The fireflies blaze. The clouds gather for the first big August thundershower of this year. That’s all._

 


End file.
